Concise, critical reviews of books, exhibitions, and projects in all areas and periods of art history and visual studies

Art of the United States
Dissertations in Progress by Subject, 2011

Show completed dissertations

Anania, Katherine, “Drawing, Discipline, and Privacy in American Studio Practice, 1963–1979” (UT Austin, R. Shiff)

Applegate, Heidi, “Staging Modernism at the 1915 San Francisco World’s Fair” (Columbia, E. Hutchinson)

Archino, Sarah, “Rewriting the Narrative of Dada in New York, 1910–1926” (CUNY, R. Long)

Aukeman, Anastasia, “The Rat Bastard Protective Association: Bruce Conner and His San Francisco Cohort, 1958–68” (CUNY, A. Chave)

Bailey, Matthew, “Turbulent Bodies: Disruptive Materiality in American Painting, 1850–1930” (Washington University, A. Miller)

Banerji, Shiben, “Marion Mahony and Walter Burley Griffin: Architecture as Global Thought” (MIT, A. Dutta)

Baradel, Lacey, “Mobile Americans: Locomotion and Identity in US Visual Art, ca. 1860–1915” (Pennsylvania, M. Leja)

Barnhart, Clara, “Making Murals Modern in the Popular Front US: Montage in the Public Art of Ben Shahn, Stuart Davis, and Thomas Hart Benton” (Washington University, A. Miller)

Baskin, Jill, “Picturing Freedom’s Shores: The Visual Culture of African Americans in Liberia, 1821–1865” (Virginia, L. Nelson)

Beetham, Sarah, “Sculpting the Citizen Soldier: Reproductions and National Memory, 1865–1917” (Delaware, W. Bellion)

Beggs, Margo, “Harriet Hosmer (1830–1908): Fame, Photography, and the American ‘Sculptress’” (Toronto, M. Gotlieb)

Besaw, Mindy, “Re-Framing the American West: Contemporary Artists Engage the Past” (Kansas, C. Eldredge)

Bianco, Christine, “Modern Art for Middle America: American Abstraction in Postwar Mass Magazines” (Oxford Brookes, E. Darling)

Bissonnette, Meghan, “The Making of an American Sculptor: David Smith Criticism, 1938–1971” (York University, D. Adler)

Bristow, Jessica E., “Gordon Matta-Clark: Deconstruction, Destruction, Art, and Architectural Confluence” (Iowa, W. Tomasini)

Boone, Jobyl, “Christo and Jean-Claude in the United States, 1964–2005” (Delaware, A. Gibson)

Brand, Elizabeth Berler, “Representing Natural History in Philadelphia, 1770–1820” (UT Austin, S. Rather, M. Cohen)

Bruner, Chelsea, “The Seventh Regiment Armory and Aesthetic Movement Interiors” (CUNY, K. Murphy)

Brunstrom, Mary Reid, “Faith’s Midwest Modern Forms: 1950s Catholic Churches by Murphy and Mackey, Architects” (Washington University, A. Miller)

Burnham, M. Helen, “Maude I. Kerns: Crafting a Modern Art, 1907–1940” (CUNY, K. Manthorne)

Burns, Emily, “Innocence Abroad: The Construction and Marketing of an American Artistic Identity in France, 1880–1910” (Washington University, A. Miller)

Burrell, Brandon, “Abbott Laboratories: Provisioning a Vision” (Florida State, K. Bearor)

Byrd, Dana E., “Reconstructions: Material Life of the Plantation, 1861–1877”
(Yale, E. Cooke, Jr.)

Campbell, Bryna, “The Comic Grotesque: Satirizing the Body Politic in American Caricature, 1925–1945” (Washington University, A. Miller)

Cao, Maggie M., “Refiguring Landscape: Zoological Agency in Late Nineteenth-Century American Painting” (Harvard, J. Roberts)

Carroll, Katherine, “Modernizing the American Medical School, 1893–1940: Architecture, Pedagogy, Professionalization, and Philanthropy” (Boston, K. Morgan)

Castenell, Wendy, “Color Outside the Lines: Liminality and Creole Identity in Louisiana from the Colonial Era to Reconstruction” (Missouri, Columbia, K. Schwain)

Chamberlain, Colby, “George Maciunas and the Art of Paperwork” (Columbia, B. Joseph)

Crawford, Katelyn D., “Itinerant Portraitists in the Late Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic World” (Virginia, M. McInnis)

Curtiss, Kimberly, “Painting Skin: The Construction of Racial Identity through Representations of American Indians in Jacksonian America, ca. 1828–1848” (Rutgers, T. Sheehan)

Dasch, Rowena Houghton, “‘Now Exhibiting’: Charles Bird King’s Picture Gallery, Fashioning Taste and Nation, 1824–1861” (UT Austin, S. Rather)

Davis, Alexandra, “Portraying the Artist-as-Celebrity in American Fashion and Lifestyle Magazines, 1923–1951” (Pennsylvania, M. Leja)

Delamaire, Marie-Stéphanie, “An Art of Translation: French Prints and American Art in the Antebellum and Civil War Era” (Columbia, E. Hutchinson)

DeLosSantos, Jenevieve, “Envisioning Egypt: American Orientalism in Turn-of-the-Century New York, 1880–1920” (Rutgers, S. Sidlauskas)

Dempsey, Kate, “Ray Johnson in Correspondence with Marcel Duchamp” (UT Austin, L. Henderson)

Dierkes, Anne-Louise, “Assemblage as Opposition: California’s Counterculture and the Struggle for US Cultural Definition” (CUNY, A. Chave)

Douberley, Amanda, “The Corporate Model: Sculpture, Architecture, and the American City, 1946–1975” (UT Austin, A. Reynolds)

Elder, Nika, “Show and Tell: Representation, Communication, and the Still-Lifes of William M. Harnett” (Princeton, R. DeLue)

Elliott, Jennifer, “The Neoclassical Backcountry: Architecture, Material Culture, and Hybrid Identities in the American South, 1780–1830” (Virginia, L. Nelson)

Ellis, Amy, “‘Not a Mere Leaf-Painter’: Thomas Cole and the Figure” (Columbia, J. Crary, E. Hutchinson)

Evans, Ariel, “To Compare Two Objects: Robert Heinecken and Martha Rosler, 1964–1984” (UT Austin, C. Smith)

Faletti, Rina, “Undercurrents of Urban Modernism: Water, Architecture, and Landscape in California and the American West” (UT Austin, M. Charlesworth, R. Shiff)

Favorite, Jennifer, “Museum Additions at US War Memorials and the Reinterpretation of National History” (CUNY, H. Senie)

Fisk, Matthew, “Art, Speculation, and Diplomacy: John Trumbull, a Federalist Painter in Europe, 1780–1816” (UC Santa Barbara, B. Robertson)

Gavino, Julianne, “Visualizing Topographies of Race and Public Space: Asian American Artists in California, 1970 to Present” (UC Santa Barbara, B. Robertson)

Gerami, Sheila, “The Hall of Fame for Great Americans: The Evolution of a Forgotten Memorial” (CUNY, H. Senie)

Gilman, Bridget, “Re-envisioning Everyday Spaces: Photorealism in the San Francisco Bay Area” (Michigan, M. Biro)

Glenn, Kimberly L., “The New Negro Renaissance and Chicago: Art, Racial Pride, and Identity” (Iowa, B. Mooney)

Gohari, Sybil E., “Through the Looking Glass: Race and Gender in the Reception of Paintings by Helen Frankenthaler and Alma Thomas” (Maryland, College Park, R. Ater)

Gordon, John Stuart, “Lurelle Guild’s Historical Modernism: The Legacy of the Colonial Revival in American Modernist Design” (Boston, K. Morgan)

Green, Kate, “Encountering Vito Acconci: Performance in the Early 1970s” (UT Austin, A. Reynolds)

Green, Midori, “Sec’s Appeal: The Secretary in American Popular Culture, 1872–1964” (Minnesota, K. Solomonson)

Green, Robin C. (Cowie), “‘A Certain Slant of Light’: Exhilaration, Oppression, and the Forces of Sunlight in American Impressionism” (Yale, A. Nemerov)

Grove, Jaleen, “A Cultural Trade: Canadian Illustrators at Home and in the United States, 1880–1960” (Stony Brook University, M. Bogart)

Harris, Shawnya, “Conceptualizing African American Art: The Market, Academic Discourse, and Public Reception” (UNC Chapel Hill, L. Williams)

Haslit, Andrew, “Gamins, Grifters, and Gentlemen: Games of Skill and Chance in American Art” (Indiana, S. Burns)

Hassan, S. Faisal, “Modernist Aberrations: The Dialectics of Expressionism in American Art and Architecture (1958–1992)” (MIT, M. Jarzombek, C. Jones)

Howe, Catherine, “Mean Men and Average Joes: The Representation and Transformation of the Average American Man in the United States, 1917–1945” (UC Santa Barbara, B. Robertson)

Iepson, Sarah, “Postmortem Relationships: Death and the Child in Antebellum American Visual Culture” (Temple, A. Braddock)

Jacks Gamble, Lauren, “Accretions of Space and Time: The Environmental Art of John Trumbull” (Yale, A. Nemerov)

Johnson, Emilie Katherine, “The Great House and Beyond: Plantation Complexes and Networks in the Antebellum Deep South” (Virginia, L. Nelson)

Karpinskaia, Natalia, “Landscape Art and Landscape Attitudes in Russia and America” (Columbia, B. Novak)

Keegan, Rebecca, “Black Artists, the Problem of Authenticity, and ‘Africa’ in the 20th Century” (Duke, R. Powell)

Kerrigan, Emily A., “Art off the Beaten Path: Developing American Modernism in New England’s Small Towns, Seaports, and Villages” (Iowa, J. Kinsey-Fields)

Kerrigan, Katherine, “Cataloguing Critique: Experimental Forms of Documentation in American Art, 1970–1977” (USC, R. Meyer)

Kim, Miri, “Right Matter in the Right Place: The Paintings of Albert Pinkham Ryder” (Princeton, R. DeLue)

King, Jennifer, “Michael Asher and the Art of Infrastructure: Space, Cities, Institutions” (Princeton, H. Foster)

Klein, Shana, “The Fruits of Empire: Contextualizing Food in Still Life Representation, 1850–1950” (University of New Mexico, K. Buick)

Knappe, Stephanie, “‘Art Perpetuating Fame’: The Visual Imagery of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West” (Kansas, C. Eldredge)

Knox, Page, “Scribner’s Monthly, 1870–1881: Illustrating a New American Art World” (Columbia, E. Hutchinson)

Kohn, Tara, “Books to Connect ‘People of the Book’: Photographic Constructions of Jewish Community in Three American Anthologies” (UT Austin, C. Smith)

Kurtz, Amy, “Old Worlds and New: Edward Lamson Henry (1814–1919), Conservative Genre Painting” (Yale, J. Prown)

LaFountain, Jason, “The Puritan Art World” (Harvard, J. Roberts)

Larson, Christina, “Paul Sample: Defining American Masculine Identity” (Case Western Reserve, H. Adams)

Laster, Margaret, “Gilded-Age Aesthetics, City, and Resort: The Art Patronage and Collecting of Catharine Lorillard Wolfe (1828–1887)” (CUNY, K. Murphy)

Lee, Kee-Lee, “Sur Vampyr: Theresa Hak Kyang Cha and the Cultural Para-Sites of the Korean Diaspora” (UNC Chapel Hill, C. Mavor)

Lee, Patricia, “Browning the White Body: Race, Color, and Perception in Modern American Visual Culture” (UC Santa Barbara, B. Robertson)

Lee, Phil, “The Hybrid Space of Photography” (Chicago, J. Snyder)

Levavy, Sara Beth, “Immediate Mediation: A Narrative of the Newsreel and the Film” (Stanford, S. Bukatman)

Levenson, Abra, “Figures and Things: Charles Demuth, 1914–1935” (Princeton, R. DeLue)

Liebert, Emily, “Roles Recast: Eleanor Antin and the 1970s” (Columbia, A. Alberro, R. Deutsche, B. Joseph)

Lindenberger Wellen, Laura, “Looking Forward Together: Artistic Collaboration and Community in the US South, 1920–1940” (UT Austin, A. Reynolds)

LoScerbo, Gianna, “A Struggle for the Real: Documentary Photography and Film in Post-WWII American Culture” (Rutgers, A. Zervigón)

Luarca-Shoaf, Nenette, “The Place of the Mississippi River in Antebellum Visual Culture” (Delaware, W. Bellion)

Lueth, Ranelle M., “Conflicting Lines: World War I Combat Artists and Their Works” (Iowa, J. Kinsey-Fields)

Mann, Crawford Alexander III, “When in Rome: Italian Travel and the Pursuit of the Ideal Male Body in Antebellum American Art” (Yale, A. Nemerov)

Masana, Megan, “Traveling Toward an Image of Democracy: The Art of Winold Reiss” (Iowa, J. Kinsey-Fields)

Maxwell, Jessica, “Heterogeneous Objects: The Sculptures of Martin Puryear” (Princeton, R. DeLue)

McCarthy, Megan, “The Empire on Display: Exhibitions of Germanic Art and Design in America, 1890–1914” (Columbia, E. Hutchinson)

McAtee, Cammie, “Form and Formalism in American Architecture in the 1950s and 60s” (Harvard, N. Levine)

McGoey, Elizabeth, “Staging Modern Domesticity: Art and Constructed Interior Displays in America, 1925–1940” (Indiana, S. Burns)

Merola, Rose, “Multiple Exposures: The Photography of Austin Hansen in Harlem” (CUNY, A. Chave)

Miller, Mark Parker, “Claiming and Denying Sophistication: Grant Wood’s Art and Responses to It, 1930–1942” (Delaware, A. Gibson)

Ming, Leta, “Making and Unmaking the Museum: Tom Marioni and the San Francisco Museum of Conceptual Art, 1968–1979” (USC, R. Meyer)

Monteiro, Lyra, “Racializing the Ancient World: Ancestry and Identity in the Early United States” (Brown, S. Alcock)

Moses, Kelema Lee, “Between Hegemony and Imperialism in the Architecture of Territorial Honolulu, 1900–1959” (Penn State, C. Zabel)

Newton, Gregory, “The Emergence of Monochrome Painting in 1950s New York” (CUNY, A. Chave)

Oliver, Christopher, “Civic Visions: The Panorama and Popular Amusement in American Art and Society, 1845–1870” (Virginia, M. McInnis)

Osdene, Stefan, “Illuminated Signscapes: The Rise of Neon Signage and Electrical Advertising in America, 1890–1960” (Wisconsin, Madison, A. Martin)

Parsons, Heather, “The Tableaux of Edward and Nancy Reddin Kienholz and the Spectacle of Photography” (Penn State, S. Rich)

Pauly, Sandra, “Rediscovering the Americas: Seeing High and Low at the World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial, New Orleans, 1884–85” (Georgia, J. Simon)

Pillen, Corey, “WPA Posters: A New Deal for Design” (Wisconsin, Madison, A. Andrzejewski)

Pohrt, Tanya, “Touring Pictures: The Exhibition of American History Paintings in the Early Republic” (Delaware, M. Leja, W. Bellion)

Porter, Austin, “Paper Bullets: The Visual Culture of American World War II Print Propaganda” (Boston, P. Hills)

Posner, Avrom, “Civic Improvement: Chautauqua and Progressive Era Aesthetic Reform” (Virginia, R. G. Wilson)

Ramsey, Rosemary, “Biases and Bridges: Reception of the Italian Avant-Garde in the United States, 1949–1957” (CUNY, E. Braun)

Ranogajec, Paul, “The Apotheosis of the Public Realm: Classical Architecture in New York City, 1880–1914” (CUNY, K. Murphy)

Reed, Emily, “Sites, Signals, and Spectacles: The Designs of Naum Gabo, Alexander Calder, and Isamu Noguchi for Public Space, 1920–1945” (Virginia, E. Turner)

Reinoza, Tatiana, “Latino Print Cultures in the US, 1970–2008” (UT Austin, C. Smith)

Rivers, Tina, “Lights in Orbit: Tech Art and the Counterculture at the Howard Wise Gallery in the 1960s” (Columbia, B. Joseph)

Ronan, Kristine, “Buffalo Dancer: The Biography of an Image” (Michigan, R. Zurier)

Root, Colin, “‘Living on the Level’: The Significance of Horizontality in Reshaping Postwar America” (Boston, K. Morgan)

Roscio, Jessica, “Photographic Domesticity: The Professionalization of Women Photographers from Home Studio to the Metropolis, 1880–1930” (Boston, K. Sichel)

Rosenbaum, Sarah, “In the Public Domain: Public Art, Advanced Capitalism, and the Contemporary City” (Harvard, Y-A. Bois)

Sablove, Henrietta, “Study Abroad: American Architects and Their Travel Sketches, 1850–1950” (Rutgers, C. Yanni)

Sawyer, Drew, “Walker Evans for Hire: Photography, Work, and Style” (Columbia, E. Hutchinson)

Schiller, Emily, “Unsettled Masses: Transportation in American Art, 1929–1946” (Penn State, L. Mazow, N. Locke)

Schwartz, Rebecca Ayres, “Thomas Cole on Architecture: Picturing the Gothic” (Delaware, B. Herman)

Scott, Kate, “The Photography of Absence: Death and Temporality in Postmodern American Photography” (Rutgers, A. Zervigón)

Sels, Kim, “Assembling Identity: The Object-Portrait in American Art, 1917–1927” (Rutgers, J. Marter)

Shannon, Heather A., “Just an Amateur: Adam Clark Vroman, Photography, and the American West, 1895–1904” (Rutgers, T. Sheehan)

Shannon, Lindsay E., “Inventing Monuments to the ‘New Woman’: Suffrage, Art, and Female Image-Building in America” (Iowa, R. Bork)

Singsen, Doug, “An Alternative by Any Other Name: Pulp Genres and Fandom in American Alternative Comics, 1974–2000” (CUNY, C. Bishop)

Sirman, Brian, “Concrete Dreams: Architecture, Politics, and Boston’s New City Hall, 1960–2010” (Boston, K. Morgan)

Situ, Xiao, “Emily Dickinson and the Window, 1830–1886” (Yale, A. Nemerov)

Sivert, Laura, “The Cultural Landscape of Hydroelectric Dams: The Tennessee Valley Authority, 1933–1945” (Penn State, L. Mazow, C. Zabel)

Smith, Jerry, “Auto-America: The Automobile and American Art, ca. 1900–1950” (Kansas, C. Eldredge)

Smith, Ginger Elliott, “Practicing Big Science: Artists, Technology, and Institutions in 1960s and 1970s Southern California” (Boston, G. Williams)

Snook, Sarah, “The Development of the American Art Market in Antebellum New York” (Columbia, E. Hutchinson, D. Rosand)

Stitt, Amber, “Images of American Children and Social Reform, 1870–1915” (Case Western Reserve, H. Adams)

Suchma, Sharon, “Binding Lives: American Photo-Books and the Great Depression” (CUNY, G. Batchen)

Swisher, Christine, “Beyond Euthenics: Home Economics and the Reinvention of the American House, 1893–1939” (Penn State, C. Zabel)

Tate, Lauren Cordes, “Pioneering Identity on the Frontier: Images of African Americans in the West, 1840–1900” (Indiana, S. Burns)

Taylor, Jacqueline, “Designing Progress: Race, Gender, and Modernism in Early 20th-Century America” (Virginia, R. G. Wilson)

Terry, Colleen, “Presence of Print: William Hogarth in British North America” (Delaware, B. Herman)

Thomas, Adam, “The Spectral Imagination: American Art between Science and Superstition in the Late Nineteenth Century” (UIUC, J. Greenhill)

Tobias, Jennifer, “The Museum of Modern Art’s What is Modern? Series, 1931–1988” (CUNY, R. Bletter)

Tuite, Diana, “Methods for Modernism: Arthur Wesley Dow Intersects the Stieglitz Circle” (Princeton, J. Wilmerding)

Vargas-Santiago, Luis, “Performing Zapata: Images in a Binational Context” (UT Austin, A. Giunta)

Vincenti, Marissa, “Our Spiritual Strivings: Gurdjieffian Philosophy, Spiritualism, and Politics in the Art of Aaron Douglas” (Duke, R. Powell)

Volpe, Lisa, “On Display: Photography and American Ideology at the World’s Fairs” (UC Santa Barbara, B. Robertson)

Walsh, Catherine, “‘Tell Me a Story’: Narrative and Orality in Nineteenth-Century American Visual Culture” (Delaware, W. Bellion)

Warak, Melissa, “Made to Music: Interactions of Music and Art, 1955–1969” (UT Austin, L. Henderson)

Washington, Tiffany, “Associated American Artists and the American Art World of the 1930s” (Case Western Reserve, A. Helmreich)

Wasserman, Andrew, “Contemporary Manhattan Cartographies: Ephemeral Public Art Projects in New York in the 1990s and 2000s” (Stony Brook University, M. Bogart)

Weathers, Chelsea, “Shooting Underground: Andy Warhol’s Cinema and the Making of a Public Image, 1963–1966” (UT Austin, A. Reynolds)

Welch, Adam, “‘Borderline Research’: Art between Canada and the United States, 1965–1980” (Toronto, E. Legge)

Williams, Dorothy Moss, “Recasting the Copy: Original Paintings and Reproductions at the Dawn of American Mass Culture, ca. 1900” (Delaware, M. Leja, M. Werth)

Wisehart, Christiane, “Seeing Things: Depression-Era Representations of Antique American Objects” (Indiana, S. Burns)

Wolf, Vanessa, “Surplus Feeling: War and Remembrance in Lee Bontecou’s Wall Reliefs, 1958–1966” (Yale, A. Nemerov)

Woltmann, Kim, “Photographing Place: Urban Space in Catherine Opie’s Los Angeles Landscapes” (Stony Brook University, M. Bogart)

Wong, Hannah, “A ‘Funny Guy’ Comes to America: Parody, Play, Irony, and the Role of Humor in the Work of Francis Picabia, 1913–1917” (UT Austin, L. Henderson)

Wood, Mary Catherine, “Benjamin West’s Nelson Memorial: Neoclassical Sculpture and the Atlantic World, ca. 1812” (Delaware, W. Bellion)

Wu, Cassie, “Perfect Objects: The Lives of Allan McCollum’s Works” (UCLA, G. Baker)

Zawadzki, Mary, “St. Nicholas Magazine: A Portable Art Museum” (CUNY, P. Mainardi)

Zhurauliova, Tatsiana, “Arcadia Americana: Landscape in the Art of Arshile Gorky, Pavel Tchelitchew, and Yasuo Kuniyoshi during World War II” (Yale, A. Nemerov)

Zundo, Mary Elizabeth, “Mapping Destiny: Cartography and Nineteenth-Century American Art of the Frontier” (UIUC, D. O’Brien)